The fall 2025 semester is off and running. I have a lot going on this semester, with Consciousness Live! kicking off in September, and teaching my usual 5 classes at LaGuardia. Since the Graduate Center Philosophy Program recently hired Kristen Andrews I have been sitting in on her philosophy of animal consciousness and society class she is offering. We are very early in the the semester but the class is very interesting and I think that Andrews will have a positive impact on the culture at the Grad Center, which is very nice!
It also allows me to address some issues that have long bothered me. As those who know me are aware, I was raised vegetarian and am now vegan. I strongly believe in animal rights and yet also reluctantly accept the role that animals play in scientific research (at least for now). I have always considered it beyond obvious that animals are conscious and that vegetarianism/vegainsim is required on moral grounds because of the suffering of animals (but also I would say there are other reasons to not eat meat).
At the same time I have long argued that we have a conundrum on our hands when it comes to animals. All we have are third-person methods to address their psychological states and they cannot verbally report. In addition we know that many things that seemingly involve consciousness can be done unconsciously. More specifically we can see in the human case that there seem to be instances where people can do things without being able to report on them (like blindsight). Given this the question opens up as to whether any particular piece of evidence one offers in support of the claim that animals are conscious truly supports that claim (given that it might be done unconsciously).
These two claims are not in tension since the first is a moral claim and the second is an epistemic/evidential/methodological claim.
To be honest I have largely avoided talking about animals and consciousness since to me it is hot-button topic that has caused many fights and loss of friends over the years. When one grow up the way I did one sees a great moral tragedy taking place right out in the open as though it is perfectly normal. It is mind-numbingly hard to “meet people where they are” on this issue (for me; to be clear I view this as a shortcoming on my part). Trying to convince people that animals are conscious or trying to convince them that since they are they should be treated in a certain way, and to met with the lowest level of response over and over takes a very special personality type to endure (and I lack it).
Then I met and started working with Joe LeDoux, who has very different views about animals. When I first met Joe he seemed to think that animals did not have experience at all. He also seemed to think that people like Peter Carruthers and Daniel Dennett shared his view, and so that it was somewhat mainstream in philosophy. I remember once he said “there is no evidence that any rat has ever felt fear,” and I was like, but you study fear in rats, so…uh, ????
Over the course of much discussion (and only slightly less whiskey) we gradually clarified that his view was that mammals are most likely conscious but we cannot say what their consciousness is like since they done’t have language. In particular they don’t have the concept ‘fear’ and so can’t be aware of themselves as being afraid. So, whatever their experience is like in a threatening condition it is probably wrong to say that it is fear, since that does seem to involve an awareness of oneself as being in danger. Joe thinks rats can’t have this kind of mental state but I am not so sure. This is an interesting question and I’ll return to it below.
Joe and I largely agreed on the methodological issue, even if we disagreed on which animals might be conscious. The way this has shown up in my own thinking is that I have tried to use this methodological argument to suggest that we won’t learn much about human consciousness from animal models. This suggests we should stop using them in this kind of research until we have a theory of phenomenal consciousness in the human case. Then we can see how far it extends.
This now brings me to Andrews. She has been arguing that we need to change the default assumption in science from one that holds we need to demonstrate that animals are conscious to just accepting this as the background default view: All animals are conscious. Her argument for this is, in part, that we don’t have any good way to determine if animals are conscious (i.e. the marker approach fails). She also argues that we need what she calls a “secure” theory of consciousness which could answer these questions. Since we don’t have that we should just assume that animals are consciousness. This, she continues, would allow us to make progress on other issues in the science of consciousness.
So it seems we agree on quite a bit. We both think that only a well-established “secure” theory of consciousness would allow us to definitively answer the question about animals. We both agree that the marker approach isn’t successful (though for slightly different reasons). We also both agree that the “demarcation” problem of trying to figure out which animals are conscious or where to draw the line between animals that are and are not conscious should be put aside for now.
But I don’t agree that we should change the default assumption. This is because I don’t think the default assumption is that animals are not conscious. The default assumption is this: any behavior that can be associated with consciousness can be produced without consciousness. That should not be changed without good empirical reason because we have good empirical reasons to accept it. However, even if we did change that default assumption we would still face the methodological challenge above with respect to the particular qualities, or what it is like for the animal. So, for now at least, I still think the science of consciousness is best done in humans.
Richard Brown 